Edwin Mieczkowski, who died in June of 2017, was a
well-recognized pioneer of Op Art in the 1960s and an
artist who during the next five decades went on to make
significant contributions to both the Op and Geometric
Abstraction movements. LewAllen Galleries has represented the work of this remarkable artist for more than
ten years and now presents Vibrations of the Eye, Mind
and Soul, a memorial survey exhibition honoring Mieckowski’s 60-year career dedicated to making art that dealt
inventively with all three realms suggested by the show’s
title.

purity. As a beloved professor at the Cleveland Institute
of Art, Mieczkowski also shared his rigorous and often-idiosyncratic ideas about art with thousands of students. In
an obituary that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
he was described as being “without question … the most
influential artist who lived in Cleveland during the second
half of the twentieth century.”
That stature was demonstrated when, in 2004—with
Mieczkowski lying in a Houston hospital awaiting emergency surgery for an aortic aneurysm—bulldozers threatened to level his Cleveland studio containing his lifetime’s
work. An urgent alert was put out by a local art writer
and within hours dozens of art lovers responded and a
rescue caravan of cars and trucks relocated and saved
Mieczkowski’s art in the nick of time.

Mieczkowski’s legacy—secure in post-World War II American art history—is defined both by his dazzling pictorial
strategies of perceptual abstraction and by his later work
that moves beyond just Op: lively compositions examining more closely not only the mechanism, but also the
poetry of how we see, and the relationship of the eye
with both the mind and the soul.

The LewAllen exhibition explores Mieczkowski's diverse
artistic experiments with physical science and visual
geometry as sources for aesthetic stimulation in two
and three dimensions. Defining his own sense of the
avant-garde over his long career, Mieczkowski’s art continually plumbed the possibilities of geometry, mathematics, nuclear physics, optics and the science of light
and the visible spectrum. He created a vibrant body of
paintings, sculptures, and multi-media constructions
with a visual energy achieved through the lively arrangement of shapes, lines, and colors, both intuitive and carefully studied.

His career is as fabled as his work is innovative. Mieczkowski’s paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 landmark Responsive Eye exhibition—the
major initial consideration of the international Optical Art
phenomenon of the 1960s. It was also featured in Time
magazine’s 1964 article, “Op Art: Pictures that Attack the
Eye,” the first printed instance of the term used to describe the then-burgeoning artistic movement based on
retinal stimulation and perception. It was again featured
in the major exhibition Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the
1960s, held at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2007.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1929, Mieczkowski studied at the
Cleveland Institute of Art, where he later taught for
nearly four decades. Unlike many of his peers in the Op
and Geometric Abstraction movements, Mieczkowski by
choice spent most of his career out of the commercial
limelight. He was well-known in academic, museum and

art criticism circles for his place in the history of 20th
century American Art as a leader of the Op Art and
evolving Geometric Abstraction movements, and has
seen a remarkable renewal and spotlight on his art in
recent years. As the title Vibrations of the Eye, Mind and
Soul attests, this selection of works is inspired by Mieczkowski’s own professed life-long dedication to making
works that are impossible to dismiss.

stract expressionism popular in New York City at the same
time (Mieczkowski himself referred to this movement as
a “cult of emotional expressionism”). The Anonima artists’ mode of abstract art was a deliberate, disciplined
practice informed by the rigorous principles of science,
mathematics, and technical precision rather than overt
expressionism or the aesthetic semantics of painterly
abstraction. Sharing studio space in Cleveland and New
York City, and even opening an artist-run gallery in an old
dress shop in downtown Cleveland, the Anonima artists
proudly eschewed commercialism and often refused to
exhibit or even sign their work. Tellingly, Mieczkowski
preferred the term “perceptual abstraction” to “Op Art,”
which was a term coined by the press.

EYE
Throughout his career, Mieczkowski’s art presented a
singular vision that married precision with a lively, aesthetic use of color and a striking sense of gesture that
activated both physiological and emotional response.
As such, his significant contributions to both the Op
and Geometric Abstraction movements characteristically mediated an active collaboration between artist and
viewer. Mieczkowski felt that a key part of his art must
include the response his pictorial strategies engendered,
and without that involvement, he considered his work to
be incomplete.

Mieczkowski’s art made as a member of the Anonima
group is enfolded in finely considered systems of shards,
planes, lines and angles, in both black and white and
richly graded color as in Cornered II (1963) and Extrend
(1964). These works are excellent examples of perceptual art, showcasing his investigation into the visual effects
of mathematically mapped-out networks of lines and
planes. Another series he worked on during this time
was his Bloc paintings, which seem to glow as if possessing a light from within, built through carefully constructed gradients of value and hue. Works like these read as
important landmarks within the growing movement of
Op Art.

This resolute commitment to the interactive function
of visual art formed an important basis for the Anonima group, a small artist collective founded in 1960 and
comprised of Mieczkowski, Ernst Benkert, and Francis
Hewitt, that sought to explore the effects of geometry
and hue upon visual perception. At the forefront of a
sea-change in abstract art that would grow into what became the Op Art Movement, the Anonima group’s style
arranged complex relationships between points, planes,
lines and angles to simulate dimensional space and confound vision. Classic examples of these visual investigations include Mieczkowski’s Anon (1961) and Study for
Iso-Rounds and Bumpers (1964).

“Man’s eyes are not windows, although he has long regarded them as such,” reads the first line of Time magazine’s landmark 1964 article on Op Art (Mieczkowski’s
painting, Adele’s Class Ring, appeared on page 84 of that
issue). The publication of the Time article signified the
arrival on the public stage of the Op Art movement, a
new art-world rival to abstract expressionism at a time
when AbEx was losing its luster as the forefront of the
American avant-garde.

The group was formed partially in response to what the
artists saw as the egoism and “unconscious hand” of ab3

And so the mid-1960s was an exciting time for the Anonima artists, heralding a new chapter in the careers of artists who had dismissed commercial success as secondary
to the purity of their artistic pursuits. Mieczkowski, who
was just beginning his extended teaching career at the
Cleveland Institute of Art, saw his paintings’ inclusion in
the first major museum exhibition of Op Art in 1965, The
Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, alongside other important perceptual artists such
as Josef Albers, Victor Vasarely, Julian Stanzcak, Morris
Louis, Kenneth Noland, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Carlos
Cruz-Diaz, Ad Reinhardt, Jesús Rafael Soto and Bridget
Riley.

like Red Crane (1982) and Dark Crane (1982) reference
the industrial landscape of the Cleveland waterfront and
stockyards with its cranes and ships, and the railroads
and bridges of Pittsburgh, where he lived with his family as a young boy. These works suggest an intersection
between industry and nature through overlapping kaleidoscopic shapes and majestic diagonal lines. The Crane
series is fascinating in taking visual cue from the geometric principles of Op and Perceptual art while also manifesting the artist’s physical joy in the sheer materiality of
paint and texture.
To art writers and museum curators, Mieczkowski’s art
had always stood out in its marriage of Op-inflected precision with a lively aesthetic use of color, and its striking
sense of gesture and brushwork, as in Feb 28, 1971, 1:30
PM (1971), Blue Dock and Crane (1987) and Square Rack
Series #33 (1974). In 1979, Edward Henning, then the
Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Cleveland, noted Mieczkowski’s willingness to depart from the
controls of the systems that other Op artists had insisted
upon. “Of the group, he reminds one most of Cézanne
as opposed to Seurat or Mondrian,” he wrote, “particularly in his synthesis of painterly qualities with structural
order.”

Between 1964-1966, during the heyday of Op Art and
despite his previous reluctance to do so, Mieczkowski allowed his work to be exhibited in New York City at
the gallery of the influential art dealer Martha Jackson,
and in Paris, Warsaw, London, and even Zagreb, Croatia
(then Yugoslavia). Through the explosion of Op Art on
the world stage, Mieczkowski was a key figure in the development of a new visual language in contemporary art.
MIND
In 1967, Mieczkowski began a two-year sabbatical from
teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and moved
with his family (and four kids in tow) to New York City to
teach at the Pratt Institute and Cooper Union, opening a
painting studio in the Bowery above his friend and sculptor Bill Barrett. “I wanted to move on at a swifter pace
and make myself heard as a painter,” Mieczkowski told
an interviewer in 2012. “I had become impatient with
the [Anonima] group’s process—too much talking and
not enough painting.”

Through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s Mieczkowski explored new ideas from physics, as well as biomedicine
and biotechnology. Particularly relevant to Mieczkowski was the theory of the fractal, which referenced the
observable patterns within the apparent irregularities of
the natural world. As in Mieczkowski’s Fractal paintings
and drawings, an important aspect to this concept is the
repetition of identical and also similar elements at different scales. For an artist with such a deep interest in
the machinations of perception, the visual application of
such an elemental mathematical concept was a match
made in heaven.

As Mieczkowski saw an opportunity to explore fresh directions in his art, his work reflected a growing interest
in texture and imagery inspired by observation. Works
4

He continued to paint vibrant suggestions of depth and
space, but with a freer sense of variation on a precise
motif or pattern—as well as a more impressionist use of
the color spectrum, as in his Rack series. It was from this
series that he began to work more sculpturally, in painted, three-dimensional constructions like Collage I (1983)
and Leith Walk Red (1984), and later, larger scale sculptures that also reference his Crane series: Frank Lloyd
(1986) and Small North (1987).

of this recognition was that his art reached now into a
painterly realm that was more irregular and expressive,
memorable and visceral. Where many of his Op Art peers
seemed to treat their scientific allusions as formal optical
exercises, Mieczkowski’s lines, planes, angles, and references to biomedicine and physics were always means to
an end: the creation of a work of art that would have
meaning to the heart as well as the mind.
“Mieczkowski tolerates errors – and
often celebrates the way they introduce hiccups in his otherwise tight
rhythms,” Stephen Litt, noted art
critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer
wrote in 2007. “Evidence of the artist’s touch is apparent in the visible
dabs of pigment that cover the surface of his paintings. From a distance,
this tends to soften their geometry.”

SOUL
“Painting does not stress predictability as does science,” Mieczkowski
wrote in a 1965 paper accompanying
an early Op Art exhibition in Zagreb.
“Science strives to gives us the assurance of a constant world, where man
is capable of generating the courage
and arrogance necessary to deal
with inertia in the present.” While
his peers in the Anonima group were
devoted to the removal of the artist’s
ego, favoring optical exercises that were dependent on
structural order, as well as a sense of piety that was reflected in their noncommercial stance, Mieczkowski always seemed interested in being a painter, and in reaching his viewer beyond their eyes.

CODA
For Ed Mieczkowski, creativity was
the cessation of conformity. Throughout his career he
set his sights on making art that was equal parts from his
mind and from his heart, but always free from convention and in concerted disregard for fame, fortune or fear.
In so doing, his work inevitably touches the soul. As an
instrument of art-making, the protractor was as effective
in his hands as a brush. Rather than bucolic landscapes
or comely models as subjects, Mieczkowski found inspiration and personal delight in geometry, mathematics,
and science. That beautiful art could be the product of
such iconoclasm and wide-ranging curiosity is the ultimate eulogy to this remarkable art provocateur and genius. He will be missed but his art will endure in tribute.

Mieczkowski recognized that no matter how closely his
art adhered to precise, mathematically-planned systems, it remained susceptible to a variety of indefinable
forces both within himself and from the world at large.
He recognized that by embracing those forces, his work
might engender an emotional response and allow him
to broaden its reach. Therein lies the magic of his art,
at a wrestled-over intersection between humankind,
machine, and science: the wisdom that these combined
forces would always inform his art-making. The effect